Tuesday, May 3, 2011

Effective Online Research

When it comes to searching for details about Microsoft's APIs, I'm finding time and time again that it's often impossible to locate exactly what I'm searching for, and I've just realized why.  I shall now italicize it to indicate its truthitude:

You will not find an explicit answer to what you are looking for.

When it comes to obscure topics, unless you are a web search god, you will not be able to determine the answer to your question.

Once you realize this, you start thinking of other ways to search.  Instead of searching for the answer to an explicit question, you search for information about the topic associated with the information.  So for example if you are searching for whether you can use a domain-user SID in a Windows LSA function, you should read up on LSA functions, then just try it out.

Hypothesis testing should be a fundamental part of your online search regimen.

Keep a word processing document handy to write down different hypotheses as well as whether those hypotheses are valid or not.

You'll arrive at the answer to your question much faster than had you simply blindly searched for your exact question on google.